Aftershock Page 2

  A ripple went through the crowd of hardhats watching the confrontation, and they turned in unison toward a wiry, sharp-angled man approaching from the entrance gate. The way he stalked across the construction site told everyone he was not playing games. He went straight up to the superintendent, and the two of them got to shouting, nose to nose, like they’d had practice at it.

  Homicide Inspector Jones intervened. He brandished his pad and pen, introduced himself, and asked the men to give him their names, addresses, and phone numbers.

  “How come?” said the wiry man. “We didn’t do nothing.”

  “I’m not saying you did, okay?” Jones assured him in a soft-glove way. “It’s just that this is a crime scene here, and we need to document everyone who has been on it.”

  “You can’t detain nobody that’s not under arrest!” the man shouted, and repeated the message in Spanish to the crowd of hardhats.

  “Hold on, now,” said Jones, still softly. “We can’t allow any of you people to leave this crime scene until we document who you are and how to reach you. All of you.” He gestured to one of the precinct cops, who said something into his shoulder mic. Uniforms materialized from all around, and surrounded the crowd of hardhats.

  The wiry man said, “Is anyone here under arrest?”

  “Nobody’s under arrest. There’s been a death at your workplace, and there will be an investigation. We just need to see your IDs, and then anyone who wants to leave can go.”

  “These men were not even here last night.”

  “Until we get everyone’s information, no one is leaving.”

  I felt Cam, next to me, tense up. He’s a crime scene veteran. His instincts are worth paying attention to.

  The wiry man tried to stare down Keith Jones. Jones didn’t blink. Nobody in the crowd moved a muscle.

  Then the wiry man nodded and pulled out his wallet, and we all unclenched. “I would like your business card, please, Detective,” he said. “My name is Samuel Urias, and I am the union steward on this job.”

  I cast an eye to Donna and she nodded. Samuel Urias was the man who had called 911 to report the dead body.

  Urias said something to the two men behind him, and without a word they produced their IDs, too. Jones handed out his card. “Mr. Urias,” he said, “we can’t determine what happened here to cause this death until we get those pipes lifted. Will one of these machine operators be willing to help?”

  “No,” Urias said, without bothering to ask the workers. “They’re not doing it. But I am certified on this equipment. I will move the pipes.”

  Urias started off toward the giant front loader, and over his shoulder he said, “Clear the area.”

  Jones let a narrow smile slip past his mustache. Then he said to the nearest uniform cop, “You heard the man. Safety first.”

  * * *

  Samuel Urias took his sweet time moving those pipes off our corpse. He did a thorough walkaround inspection of the front loader. Then he powered it up, fiddled with the coupling on its talon-like grabber arm, and did another walkaround. Donna yawned. Cam worried out loud about press helicopters being bound to appear, now that there was daylight. One of the beat cops reported to Jones that a clot of trucks trying to get onto the site had gummed up the intersections across Sixth Street for blocks in all directions. That gridlock was spreading to the Central Freeway off-ramp, which was, in turn, backing up the Bay Bridge.

  “You know who lives in these condos?” Cam murmured. “Tech bros. The Google bus can’t get down Eighth Street, that’s a class-A clusterfuck.”

  “DEFCON 1,” Donna agreed.

  I scoffed at the pair of them. “Come on. It’s traffic. There’s traffic every day. Big deal.”

  “Just you wait and see,” Donna said for the second time that morning. Her boardwalk soothsayer routine was starting to grate on me.

  The site superintendent complained that the duty contractor should be here managing this emergency, but that he wasn’t answering his phone.

  “Maybe that’s him under the pipes,” Donna said to Cam.

  “Not in that suit. Or those shoes.”

  It was getting near 8:30 by the time Urias finally swung the arm of the heavy machine up in the air, opened the grabber, and lowered it slowly onto our death scene. The grabber’s tines closed around the pipes and they clattered. The truck roared. It heaved the pipes, pivoted them well away from the body, and dropped them in the dust beyond the flatbed trailer.

  Jones lifted the police tape to approach the body, then jumped clear out of his shoes at a deafening blast from the front loader’s air horn. Up in its cab Urias was wagging his finger wildly. He swung the grabber arm away to the far side of the machine, lowered it to the ground, and killed the engine.

  “Okay,” Urias hollered. “Clear!”

  It’s not easy to rile a big-city police detective, but at that moment Homicide Inspector Keith Jones looked like he had developed a burning desire to clean Samuel Urias’s clock for him.

  We followed Jones under the tape to get a clear look at the body. The head, neck, and upper rib cage had been obliterated. I’d never seen a worse case of disfigurement, except maybe in one or two bodies that had been left to decompose in the open, where animals had gotten to them. A case from the year before, involving a coyote in the woods near the Lincoln Park Golf Course, came vividly to mind. This pulpy slew leaking into a business suit was even less recognizable as a human body. Brain matter was smeared into the dirt, and hairy chunks of skull had been scattered like pottery shards. The crushed area was pink in places, red in places, but mostly just kind of tan colored.

  Donna was seeing what I was seeing, and shaking her head. “That ain’t right.”

  “Well,” I replied, “it’s interesting.”

  “What about it?” said Inspector Jones.

  “I’m concerned that we’re not seeing a giant puddle of blood here. I would expect much more bleeding from such a violent crush injury. Practically all the man’s pressurized blood should have gushed out of those ruptured neck vessels.”

  “So where is it?”

  “I can’t tell you that until I perform the full autopsy. But just on first impression, this looks like postmortem injury to me.”

  I didn’t have to explain to the homicide detective what that meant. “You think this is a homicide staged to look like an accident.”

  “I think the visible evidence indicates that this man was already dead when those pipes came down on him. Let’s see what else we can determine right now.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Jones with zero percent conviction.

  The beat cops tried to keep the construction workers from crowding the tape cordon, but it was no use. We had an audience. The crew from CSI moved back in to take more pictures, then gave us the go-ahead to handle the body.

  “’Bout time,” Cam grumbled.

  “Chill, big guy,” one of the crime scene cops snapped back. Cam didn’t like that.

  Identification is our first job and top priority. We went straight for the dead man’s pockets and found a wallet. It had a California driver’s license under the name Leopold Haring, address in San Francisco on Castenada Avenue.

  “Forest Hill,” Cam said. “Money.”

  Jones peered at the picture on the driver’s license, then at the pulp piled on the end of the man’s shoulders, and grunted. I manipulated an arm. The body was in full rigor mortis. That meant, I told Jones, he’d been dead at least six hours. Three a.m., maybe two a.m. at the earliest for a ballpark time of death.

  “But,” I reminded him, “that’s the outside window. It could be a lot earlier.”

  “Can’t you narrow that down?”

  “Let’s do a body temperature,” I said to Cam.

  We put the wallet back in Leopold Haring’s pocket where we’d found it, and Cameron yanked down the trousers. It
required some effort thanks to the rigor mortis. He inserted a thermometer into the cadaver’s rectum and told Donna it came to 80 Fahrenheit. She wrote that down, consulted an outdoor thermometer she kept in her death scene kit, and told me the ambient temperature was 54. I looked at the time and did the math.

  “He probably died between six and ten last night.”

  “That’s the best you can tell?”

  “Yes. And I might be wrong.”

  “You guys always say that.”

  “We mean it. Time of death estimation is unreliable. It depends on too many variables...”

  “Okay,” the detective said. I recalled from working with him before that he said okay a lot, but usually didn’t mean it.

  “Detective!” someone yelled from behind the cordon line. It was the superintendent, cell phone still on his ear. “Do we know who it is?”

  Jones wasn’t about to shout the dead man’s name into the crowd, so he gestured the superintendent over. I watched Jones read the name off his notebook. The superintendent’s jaw fell open. He bobbled the cell phone, dropped it in the dirt, and scrambled to pick it up. He stared at the shattered corpse in disbelief. Then he dusted off the phone and walked away, dialing frantically.

  “Hey!” the detective called out, irked. “You know this guy?”

  “Google it,” the superintendent said, and disappeared into the crowd of hardhats.

  “Goddamn people,” said Jones, and stalked after him.

  Donna already had her smartphone in hand and was typing. Cam and I huddled with her.

  Leopold Andreas Haring, 52, born in Austria, immigrated in 1989 as a graduate student in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

  “Oh, man,” said Cameron.

  Leopold Haring was one of the most famous and acclaimed architects in the world, known for a boldness of vision coupled with a towering intellect, said the one article. “‘Haring’s work unites a classical rigor of form with a disciplined attention to, and intention of, function as the sine qua non of a building,’” Donna read. “‘His use of materials has proven famously visionary, yet has always been coupled with a miraculous lack of pretension...’”

  “Enough,” said Cam.

  “Wait, you gotta hear this one. ‘He is our great cityscape cubist, the Picasso of the building arts.’”

  “Donna,” said Cam, “our shift ended half an hour ago. Can we get the pouch and gurney, please, before we end up on the news? I don’t like being on the news.”

  “Fine, fine.” She produced a white sheet, which she draped carefully over the acclaimed architect’s mortal remains, and the two of them trekked back to the van.

  I scanned the crowd of hardhats for Jones, but didn’t see him. My cell phone rang. It was the boss, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. James Howe.

  “Jessie...?” He sounded faint and far away.

  “Dr. Howe,” I hollered, and stuck a finger in my left ear. The morning shift had been standing around with nothing to do for more than three hours, and had apparently decided to fire up every heavy vehicle on the lot in preparation for the moment we allowed them to start work. I started walking and talking, searching for a quiet spot.

  “What the hell is going on up there?” Dr. Howe said. “I’ve got everyone from the highway patrol to the mayor on my ass about your death scene. They’re saying you’ve locked it all down...?”

  “Yeah, it’s not looking like an accident over here...”

  “What do you mean? It’s a construction site with a fatal crush injury, right?”

  “Not exactly. The injuries all look postmortem. It turned into a suspicious death pretty quick, so I had to call in CSI...”

  I finally found a sheltered spot, a section of unfussy concrete foundation behind a chain-link gate. It was below grade and dark, but good and quiet.

  “We just got access to the body a minute ago,” I told Dr. Howe. “We also just got a presumptive ID, but that’s another complication.”

  “Why?”

  “Now it’s suspicious and high profile. The driver’s license in his pocket belongs to a Leopold Haring. Apparently he’s a famous—”

  “Oh sweet Jesus.”

  “You’ve heard of him.”

  “Get that body into the truck and out of there before the press shows up, Dr. Teska! What happened to him?”

  I described the circumstances as we had found them, and what we had gone through to extricate the body. Dr. Howe didn’t like the story—especially once he reckoned how many scene spectators there were among the hardhats, and how many of them might have been sneaking cell phone pictures. I issued the soothing assurances I’d perfected in my short career under short-tempered boss men. I was good at it, and it worked. Dr. Howe let me go.

  I climbed back up to the cordon line. Donna and Cam had staged their gurney and were laying out a body pouch next to Mr. Haring.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Let’s get some pictures of the damage to the trouser hems and the shoes, while we still have them in situ with the drag marks in the dirt.”

  “If those are drag marks,” Cam groused.

  “That’s why I want to document them, Cam. If.”

  Donna lifted the sheet off the body and set it aside, and Cam summoned the CSI photographer to take some close-ups of the ripped fabric and scuffed leather, the socks balled down, and pale pink abrasions on both Achilles’ heels.

  “Those look postmortem, too,” I started to say—but was cut off by an anguished cry from behind us.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God! What...”

  It was a lanky man, well dressed, with silver hair. His face had gone as white as the morgue sheet.

  “Is that...is that Leo?”

  “That’s what we need you to tell us, Mr. Symond.” That was Jones. He was standing on one side of the pale man. The site superintendent stood on the other.

  “Do you recognize him?” Jones said. “I mean, anything among his effects, maybe?”

  “His head...what happened to his head? Oh God... Leo...”

  Jones put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Take all the time you need.”

  The superintendent cleared his throat and turned away. “I’ll be in my office, Jeff,” he said, and strode briskly toward the trailer.

  “Oh God...” the pale man—a Mr. Jeff Symond, evidently—said again. “That’s his suit. It looks like his shoes. Is he wearing a U-Penn ring?”

  Jones turned his flat gaze to me. I lifted the dead man’s hand and examined the college ring.

  “Yes.”

  “What year, Mr. Symond?” asked Jones gently.

  “Nineteen ninety-one.”

  They both looked to me. I nodded.

  Jeff Symond’s mouth hung open. His breathing was shallow, eyes glassy. He swiveled suddenly, stumbled, and vomited into the dirt under the police cordon tape.

  Cameron muttered, “That’s another DNA profile to rule out,” and Donna stifled a snicker. I glared daggers and ordered them to get going with collecting the remains.

  Symond wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, his back still turned. I went to him, asked if he was dizzy. He shook his head. I waved over a patrol cop.

  “Take Mr. Symond up to the trailer and get him a chair and a glass of water, okay?”

  They started off, carefully. Symond did not look back.

  “Can I talk to you, Keith,” I said to Jones, and walked away from the cordon. He followed.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I spat, too loud, and turned the heads on a couple of nearby beat cops. I tamped down my temper and dropped into a church whisper. “You don’t bring a civilian to a crime scene! What were you thinking—?”

  “What’s wrong with me? You’re forgetting this is my scene.” He kept his body language lax for the benefit of the uniforms and hardhats craning to eavesdrop, but the anger in h
is voice matched mine. “This guy shows up at the gate, says he’s the decedent’s business partner. Apparently the superintendent called him, asked him to get down here. He demands—demands—to see the scene of the accident. He wants to see how it happened.”

  “Accident—?”

  “Yeah, accident. To me this looks like an industrial accident. You say different, based, as far as I can tell, on intuition about the blood spatter. Okay. Maybe you’re right—we’ll all find out sooner or later. But you’ve been way wrong, calling accidents homicides before, and I’m not taking any chances with your work, Doctor.”

  “That is not fair.”

  “Maybe not. Like I said, we’ll all find out sooner or later. This Mr. Jeffrey Symond is the partner of the man who holds the presumptive ID for our corpse over there. I figured he could tell us something about the pipes and how they fell, maybe. Or at least he could confirm the ID—”

  “On a guy with no fucking face? Give me a break, Keith. You and I both know we’re going to get fingerprints off that body as soon as we get it back to the morgue, and those prints will match the DMV database for our presumptive. The ID will be solid. You didn’t have to drag that poor man over here. It’s unprofessional and sadistic.”

  “Sadistic—?” Keith Jones was losing his struggle to keep his body language from matching his words, and the hardhats were starting to notice. “Sadistic is leaving that dead man out there for, what...? Four hours now? Why don’t you do your job and get the body out of here.”

  “Your crime scene, Inspector, but my body. You know that. The body and everything on it is my jurisdiction.”

  “So why don’t you go look after it.”

  “So why don’t you go—”

  I stopped myself, which was just as well. We turned our backs on one another and walked away.

  Donna and Cam had slid the body onto the white sheet, scooping up the mess that remained of the man’s head and shoulders, along with some bloody dirt and rubble. They tied the ends of the sheet into knots like a shroud, then lifted it up and placed it in the body pouch, which in turn went onto the gurney.